Celebrate Fine Local Dining at COOLinary New Orleans

Throughout the month of August, New Orleans residents and visitors are treated to a superb dining experience—the annual COOLinary New Orleans event, sponsored by the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. The month features unbeatable deals on high-quality local cuisine hosted by restaurants throughout the city, and all are invited to partake in the foodie celebration.

With COOLinary New Orleans, restaurants offer special lunch and dinner menus crafted just for the summertime—a way to “cool down,” as the event hosts describe it. More than 50 restaurants participate each year, and each hope that their unique menu will help them become a new favorite for locals and tourists alike.

For a taste of the coming menus, Café Degas offers its own $20 lunch and $33 dinner menus at the restaurant, located in the historic Faubourg St. John area and Mid-City on Esplanade Ave, the street that divides the French Quarter and the Marigny down closer to the Mississippi River. GW Fins in the French Quarter, which prints a new menu daily, will take diners on a culinary expedition around the world with its $35 dinner menus offered Sunday through Thursday. The Pelican Club, also in the French Quarter, will offer a COOLinary $35 dinner menu as well. And this is just a small sample of what’s to come, though the prices ($20 lunch, $35 dinner, both either two or three-courses) will be fairly standard at most participating restaurants.

Some COOLinary restaurants even feature drink specials, most of which are not limited to COOLinary deals either. For example, in the past, Café Adelaide hosts a 25-cent, 3-martini lunch that’s not exclusively limited to martinis. Antoine’s joins the part with its own 25-cent lunch martini offer. Galvez, which serves Spanish cuisine in the French Quarter, hosts a happy hour from 5 to 7 p.m. that includes discounts on both drinks and tapas, and other restaurants join in on the COOLinary happy hours as well.

COOLinary New Orleans is a great time of year to check out restaurants usually deemed too expensive to visit and is a chance to expand and refine a foodie’s palate thanks to all of the varied restaurants who participate.

If you’re looking for one of the best times of the year to visit in search of great food, August, thanks to COOLinary New Orleans, is a prime time to be here.